Archives for June, 2006

What else can I think, when reading Echidne of the Snakes, I run across this astonishing gem of self-loathing femininity. If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt and politics, what would you do? Hoo-boy, this is where I get in trouble, and that starts with “T” and that rhymes with…

Time’s former “Blog of the Year,” the execrable PowerLine blog with which I share a state, has done it again: said something so stupid and so palpably false that I’m feeling a bit embarrassed about ragging on Oklahoma in my previous post—I should feel ashamed by association at being a Minnesotan. Check out Deltoid: down…

Oh, geez, Oklahoma. There was a weird court case there recently. Well, maybe not so weird, unfortunately—I could see it happening here. To make it short, an atheist girl in high school was kicked off a sports team because she wouldn’t join in team prayers; abuse ensued; school officials lied; the principal assaulted the father;…

Some of you may recall a movie of mating slugs I mentioned before…now here’s a site with photos of the act. In case you’re baffled, the strange translucent blue sheets hanging down are the interwined penises of the two slugs. Don’t they make a beautiful couple? (Thanks, Craig Clarke! Does your mother know you browse…

There are always a few strange leads to cephalopod miscellany in my mailbag…people have this odd idea that I like tentacled molluscs. So here we go, a few strange things on the strange ol’ internet. This t-shirt is anatomically incorrect! I’m not sure what that thing is, but it’s no cephalopod I’ve ever seen. Although…

When I criticized that Ron Numbers article, I should have mentioned there were lots of other peculiar little comments that I didn’t bother to address. Jason Rosenhouse fills in the gaps. One of the things Numbers tried to argue was that creationists are pro-science because they pay lip service to science…but Jason squashes that idea.…

Atrios finds it odd that, since 31% of Americans believe in astrology and it qualifies as a mainstream belief, that “people are falling all over themselves to mock someone who had a perfectly mainstream belief apparently shared by millions and millions of Americans.” I just have to say that in my case it’s not odd…

One of many open questions in evolution is the nature of bilaterian origins—when the first bilaterally symmetrical common ancestor (the Last Common Bilaterian, or LCB) to all of us mammals and insects and molluscs and polychaetes and so forth arose, and what it looked like. We know it had to have been small, soft, and…

…but I have to defend Rush Limbaugh. He was detained for having a bottle of Viagra at the airport? What was he going to do, threaten Palm Beach with his little gift from god? I think Limbaugh is a lying hypocritical scumbag, but what alarms me more here is the way airport security and customs…